When Mayor Marion Barry established the Summer Youth Employment Program, it transformed the lives of young people in Washington, DC.
And we've made sure to build on his legacy:
โข Less than 2 weeks after I became Mayor, we named the program after him
โข Created tweens program
โข Expanded the program to include 18-24 year olds
โข Established Mayorโs Opportunity Scholarship in 2017
โข Welcomed 126,000+ participants since 2015
And this summer, 15,000 young people are participating in MBSYEP.
A cornerstone of summer in DC, a priority of my Administration, and another way that DC leads the nation.
The jerseys have the names of both the settler colonies and the damned invader countries on them.
The men wearing those jerseys are overrepresented by those who were invaded, trafficked, pulled by violences of separation and curated, generation after generation, as capital assets by Western nation-states suckling on far away and somehow regenerating motherlands in their wake.
The โWorld Cup,โ like the Olympics, puts this on display.
Hereโs to the โhoods,โ extensions of points of origin worlds away from where they gather themselves to struggle against predator states who cheer them on, until they donโt.
What is the French team but a machine fueled by African batteries?
What is โPortugalโ vs โSpainโ but a metaphor for the first two major criminal enterprises battling each other with weapons pilfered from far off lands? Or โBrazilโ or the โUSโ teams as strewn with bodies born from peoples held in everyday contempt except when on the pitch?
The Beautiful Game is indeed that. Thanks for reminding us of the sources of so much of its beauty.